The silence in the delivery room wasn't peaceful; it was heavy, like the air before a thunderstorm.
Usually, a birth is a cacophony of crying and the hum of biometrics. But when I arrived, the machinery held its breath. The doctor wasn't looking at me or my mother. He was staring at the empty air hovering above the bassinet, his face draining of colour.
"The feed," the doctor whispered, tapping the side of his optical lens. "It's not syncing. Where is the projection?"
My mother, exhausted and straining to see, asked the question that would haunt the rest of my life. "What's wrong with him?"
"Nothing physical," the doctor said, his voice tight with a fear he couldn't hide. "But... he has no Echo. There is no future data rendering. It's just... blank."
A nurse took a step back, her hands retreating as if I were contagious. In a world where every newborn arrives with a translucent shadow of their tomorrow a glowing assurance of their potential I was born entirely, terrifyingly singular.
Seventeen years later, that emptiness is my trademark.
My legal name is Kairo, but the city calls me "The Black Zone." It's not a nickname born of respect; it's a technical error. I am a walking blind spot.
I don't register on the prediction algorithms. While other students walk through the halls trailed by the shimmering ghosts of their next ten seconds tripping before they actually trip, laughing before the joke lands, I am just static. I am the only person in the world who happens in real-time.
Surveillance drones hate me. You can hear their rotors whine as they try to lock onto a future trajectory that doesn't exist. It puts people on edge. Predictability is the currency of our society; knowing what happens next keeps people safe.
I make them unsafe.
The shift happened on a Tuesday, during the walk home from the academy.
The sky, usually a regulated azure, bruised into a sickly violet. The atmosphere grew pressurized, causing my ears to pop. Then, the city-wide hum of the surveillance grid cut out.
Silence.
Around me, the street froze. Not the people, but their Echoes.
Thousands of shimmering blue projections businessmen checking watches, couples arguing, kids chasing balls glitched. They seized up like a paused video, vibrating violently in place.
Then, they shattered.
The projections dissolved, replaced instantly by a new, synchronized vision. Every Echo on the street, from the toddler to the elderly, shifted to show the same horrified scene:
Fire. A skyline crumbling into dust. The red countdown clock of an extinction event.
72 Hours Remaining.
I stood in the middle of the panic, my heart hammering against my ribs. I looked down at my own hands, checking my periphery.
Still nothing. No fire. No death. Just me.
The screams started, but they were cut short as the crowd realized I was the only one not burning in their visions. The sea of terrified faces turned toward me.
"Look at him," a woman whispered, backing away. "He's not in the projection."
"He's the anomaly," a man shouted, pointing a trembling finger. "He's the reason the timeline ends."
They didn't see a boy anymore. They saw the error code that was about to crash the world.